What Host Site(s) Do You Use For Your Website(s)?

[robc]

< gulp >

A different "planet", indeed.

Thanks to Neil for posting his questions - I'd like to add another: how much bandwidth do you need for your site, and what kind of site is it? That is, I'm curious to get a sense of the range typically needed to support a modest personal site aimed at sharing work with friends, vs a "serious" gallery site with e-commerce pretensions, vs a megasite like QT's.

you can work it out fairly simply.

daily visitors × average image size kb × average number of images viewed by a visitor × 30 × 2

note that the × 2 doubles up the value to give you a safety margin and accomodate email bandwidth and backup bandwidth.


so for example, if you 100 vistors a day with avaerage image size of 100kb and each visitor views 20 images then you get

100 × 100 × 20 × 30 × 2 = 12000000Kb or 12000MB or 12GB per month.

You will need to look at your web stats to work out what the averages are for your site.

getting visitors will be the key to how much bandwidth you need.

ISP's can offer massive amounts of bandwidth to tempt you to buy in the knowledge that very few sites will ever use more than a tiny fraction of that bandwidth.

Also some ISP's include their daily backups of your webspace in your used bandwidth figures.

What is the most important thing is how well the ISP manages the load on its servers. Unless you purchase a dedicated server, then you are on a shared server and you may be sharing it with 5, 10, 50 or 100 or 500 other websites any of which might suddenly implement a high bandwidth web site and the performance on your site will drop accordingly. At that point a good ISP will do something about it. The cheap ISP's won't.

Nearly all ISP's only offer support on their services, they don't offer support on design and scripting. They may help you with FTP to your web space.

[vinny]

apughosting.org
$5/month
quick responses to questions
the rest has been posted already

[kjsphotography]

http://www.realwebhost.com/

Fast, Affordable and awesome support. I sell and makes site for a living and I use these guys not only for my own personal site but my clients also.

They are very good.

Kevin

[jackies]

I use betterphoto.com. They have various levels from free to Pro. Easy to use. They have templates, fonts to choose from and other ways to enhance your site. Great support but have never had ANY problem with them.

Highly recommended for those who want an easy way to setup a site. I would rather be doing photography than learn how to build and design a site.

Jackie

[Chris_Brown]

For those who have their own websites, what hosting site (or hosting sites) do you use as a place to put your website for internet access?

> What do you like about them?

> What's their maximum space alloted per customer.

> What don't you like about them?

> How much do they charge per year for hosting a website?

> How much do they charge per year for domain name registration or renewal?

> What kind of technical support do they provide?

> How long have you used them, and would you recommend or not recommend them?

For the last seven years I've used BlueHost and have been very pleased with their customer service, tech support, up-time and server maintanence. It uses shared hosting so the cost is not shocking: $7 per month. Their list of features is here.

Best of all, they use Unix/Apache for their server software, not Windows.

[David_Senesac]

Yahoo/AT&T. Because I already have other accounts with them and they are one of the 800 pound gorrilas one doesn't have to deal with usual net problems or lack of support tools with. Could be paying less since I live in a hotbed of high tech with lots of providers but for a few more bucks prefer simplicity and lack of worries. In my case, I just wrote my own html code for a simple yet unique visual site meant to look different and downloaded it directly. I regularly tweak, add, and remove html files with the default Yahoo filemanager tool so don't have the usual application tool limitations. Today I added a free to download 2007 calendar to my site for example which took just a few minutes. ...David

[Gordon Moat]

For those who have their own websites, what hosting site (or hosting sites) do you use as a place to put your website for internet access?

000domains

> What do you like about them?

Convenient and easy to access site controls with statistics. No sites on the SPEWS Block List within their realm of IP addresses.

> What's their maximum space alloted per customer.

Varies per plan agreement, though I am far from needing any extra storage. Maybe a video website would need more storage.

> What don't you like about them?

I chose my latest plan with them because they offered webmail services. Their webmail is a bit behind the times, and not as useful as I expected.

> How much do they charge per year for hosting a website?

Starter package is $5.25 a month currently. I have the Standard at $7.95 per month. That should cover a huge amount of traffic, even with the volume of images and hits I get each month.

> How much do they charge per year for domain name registration or renewal?

$13.50 and I think a slight discount for multi-year or more than one domain. They also tend to have specials for people signed up with them that provide slightly more discount.

> What kind of technical support do they provide?

I am not sure I could give a good answer to that. I only needed Tech Support three times, and they were very quick solving those problems. The only slightly slow one was a problem I had with my webmail, which took them nearly half a day to correct.

> How long have you used them, and would you recommend or not recommend them?

I have used them for site registration many years. Their hosting packages are new, so I have used that barely a year. The site controls, access, and statistics work fine. I would wish that their webmail would be upgraded or improved. If you really need good webmail, maybe another company would be better; though if you only want site hosting, they are very reliable with their uptimes.

A few things not many people consider. The SPEWS Block List, and similar sites, chart spammers and spam host providers. If you host your non-spamming site on a group of server known to be used by spammers, then you might find access to your site blocked from various servers, or at the very least find that your site e-mail is blocked going to various servers. This is a judgement call with host providers, though ethically we should carefully choose not to support companies that enable spammers to do their business.

Uptime is the reliability of the servers, which means when or if your site might become unavailable. You can check this through several internet monitoring companies, such as Netcraft. When you click on that link, just type in the name of a site you know to be on a particular server for a host company, or simply use the name URL of the hosting company. You can find out if outages are frequent, or rare.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat
A G Studio